Posted At : November 19, 2007 5:10 PM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

It never ceases to amaze me at how little knowledge so called SEO companies are proud of spouting as part of their sales pitch. We received the following email that I think was supposed to encourage us to pick up the phone but instead had us in stitches.

Email from company X

My name is XXXX from XXXX. I’ve just performed a complimentary link check for you to highlight how popular your website is around the web. Thank you in advance for taking a few minutes to read this.

Here we go......

Here is the result:
[site name] is currently linked to by 9 websites. I have used Google to find these links because for most people this is the most important search engine.

Ever hear of Yahoo! Site Explorer"? For many years now it's been common knowledge that the 'link' operator used by Google to display links back to a site is a fictional representation. If you want to know what links Google sees pointing to your website then webmaster tools will give you an indication once you've created an account and verified the site you're registering as your own. Otherwise Yahoo! Site Explorer gives an indication.

A higher number of links pointing to your website means you can achieve far higher rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN - meaning that you attract more customers, make more profit, and benefit from an increasing return on investment.

Quantity yes but no mention of quality here? Quality links will not only heighten the 'trust' associated with your own website but will also help you withstand the fluctuations inflicted by the algorithm changes.

To achieve the above, the full service we are offering you includes on-going link campaigns plus the peace of mind that your website is always correctly "tuned" to the search engines' current algorithms (extremely important these days).

Ha Ha Ha!

To make sure you get the results you need, your actual search engine results are backed by our 2 tier Top 10 Promise:
1. If we don’t achieve first page rankings for your selected search terms on Google, Yahoo, MSN we’ll refund your money! 2. If we don’t then keep you on first page rankings for your selected search terms on Google, Yahoo, MSN we’ll refund your money!

At every stage of your campaign you will be kept fully up to date, with regular reports detailing exactly how your search terms are performing across the search engines.

We have achieved excellent results for many of our clients using extremely competitive search terms. To find out what kind of results our clients have experienced, we are happy to provide you with their contact details so you can contact them directly.

You will also benefit from your own personal account manager whom you may contact at any time should you need any assistance or have any questions.

Very impressive indeed....

However doing a search on Google and I quote "I have used Google to find these links because for most people this is the most important search engine" this company do not appear for any of the top 20 key phrases used by search engine optimisation companies. And regardless of their promotional techniques a quick look at the source of the home page shows the first meta tag as:

"meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="robots" /"

For those that don't know, this tells the search engines robots that visit your site and index the content, to steer clear. Don't come here, do not look and certainly don’t include us in your index! It beggars belief really but certainly provides a good laugh!

Posted At : October 8, 2007 7:54 AM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

Yahoo! have just released Yahoo Search Assist in the US. It's another technology enabler that searches the Yahoo! results database and makes alternative suggestions while you type. The idea is a solid one and as average searchers become more 'search savy', more accurate results can be produced with more accurate search terms. They are to be congratulated; it's not bad although it can be a bit annoying when the search assist box won't disappear. The scroll arrows are very small and the results won't scroll unless you click on either the up or the down arrow and for what appears to be around 10 - 20 suggestions. In addition to this, the search assist box stretches right across the screen with a lot of grey space which is unnecessary and visually unappealing. Although unable to reproduce it a second time, I did find a search phrase that occupied the majority of the grey area with a set of results that required you to scroll horizontally as well as vertically on the left hand side......messy.

This kind of technology isn't ground breaking though and one of the biggest search engines, Google has been playing with it for longer than I care to remember. In true style, their version is simple, uncluttered and easy to use and I think that Yahoo! Search Assist could be simplified to enhance the user experience further. Bring it on for the UK!

Posted At : October 3, 2007 2:31 PM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

Although not considered one of the big players, search engine Wisenut has closed its doors to the public. Owned by Looksmart, the reasons are as yet unclear but a combination of no clear long term strategy and failure to focus on what the search community are looking for seem to have contributed to its downfall.

Over the years Looksmart have not necessarily made the most sensible management decisions and an underutilised top heavy management team may have been part of the problem. Unfortunately they perpetuated a perception of poor value amongst SEM professionals by failing to engage the SEM community which all contributed to their negative image over the years.

Posted At : August 2, 2007 9:17 AM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

Google doesn't give much away which is part of what makes the challenge of ranking well all the more interesting. Because the search engine has so many pages indexed, it's tended to split its results across 2 indexes, one more relevant than the other. Pages that were deemed 'less relevant' were stored as part of the 'supplemental index' and this could have been for any number of reasons but it at least provided an opportunity for search marketers to identify these pages and work to convert them into more relevant content pieces and improving the overall results returned.

However, last week Google removed this feature of marking these pages as 'Supplemental Results'. The explanation was that a huge amount of work has been done to bring the two indexes closer together therefore enhancing the quality of the results returned so there was no longer the need to identify these results separately but in reality it simply cannot work that way. As well a storage area for badly structured pages the supplemental index was a holding area for all the spam results that are generated by automated programmes designed to fool Google into high rankings. Google say they will have rolled out this combined index by the end of the summer and if they've finally identified a way of correctly identify spam whilst allowing genuine pages to perform better then that can only be a good thing. But, if things remain as they are with 2 separate unidentified indexes, the challenge gets even harder with many good pages being sent to 'supplemental hell' with no indication of where improvement is needed.

Posted At : July 13, 2007 12:44 PM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

Bots and Humans

We've heard rumours for some time now that in order to keep its results in check, Google uses a team of human evaluators to check the results of its automated search algorithm. The numbers of people involved are unknown but speculation suggests that there are somewhere in the region of 10,000 people worldwide who belong to this team. Scepticism is always rife when it comes to Google and what they do to get their results but recently whilst doing some log file analysis we found the following referral: https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=xxxxxx. I wouldn't recommend trying to open the url as access is obviously limited to those with the correct "evaluation" accounts but it confirmed in our minds that this is a real team of people checking results.

Is Human Evaluation a Good Thing?

It should be. There's no reason to suspect otherwise but humans are capable of making errors. Without knowing the criteria used for human evaluation it's impossible to say what problems could arise. It can't be the highest paid job in the world and as we understand it is usually carried out by students on a part time basis being paid by the hour. The fact that we hear very little about it and the criteria used for checking, we suspect that Google has tied down contractual arrangements pretty well and would therefore hope that those arrangements also extend to the quality of the human evaluation.

Posted At : July 4, 2007 8:11 PM
Related Categories: Search Marketing News

There are sites hosted in countries out there which will scrape or cache your pages using proxy servers to store copies of those pages. Having copies of your pages available to search engines means that someone is going to suffer duplicate content penalties (loss of rankings) and for some very strange reason it appears that, particularly in Google, the original content is being penalised in favour of the proxy content. This not only destroys traffic levels and revenue streams but leads to further problems that as yet, there are no definitive solutions for.

950 Penalty

Since last year (2006) sites that previously ranked well for their main key phrases disappeared from the search engine results pages (SERPs) and only by digging really deep into the results have the sites been found languishing around the -950 mark. There are ways in which sites can recover from this which we'll cover at a later point but an excellent discussion on the 950 penalty can be found at webmasterworld.com.

Proxy Duplicate Content

Unfortunately there is no best way to deal with proxy duplicate content. There are a number of measures you can put in place to protect yourself. A common problem is the proxy server 'bots' will spoof their identity, identifying themselves as genuine search engine 'bots' and conducting reverse and forward DNS look ups prior to allowing access can combat this. But if you're not really concerned about traffic from the most common originating countries for proxy servers then you'd just as well ban IP ranges from countries such as China and Russia. Admittedly a more blanket effect, but a very positive solution none the less.

Content Hijacking

Content hijacking will always be part of the Internet. If you produce excellent work, others are always going to copy it and pass it off as their own - we know because it's happened to us. You're not usually aware of it until things go wrong and knowing how to recover and taking measures to stop it happening again is what's going to put your site back on top.